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StikyPad was one of several readers letting us know that Psystar has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. We've discussed the Mac clone maker's battleswithApple extensively. The company apparently has over $250,000US in debt, and states that it cannot turn a profit in the current economy. "The Chapter 11 filing will temporarily suspend Apple's copyright infringement suit against Psystar, which is currently before the US District Court of Northern California. But once the bankruptcy protection is sorted out, the copyright case will resume." And PC Mag is reporting that, on the other side of the Atlantic, two new clone companies are just getting started. Like PsyStar, FreedomPC and RussianMac promise to deliver PCs with OS X preloaded.

Windows just isn't ready for the desktop yet. It may be ready for the coasters that you nerds use to sit your colas on, but the average computer user isn't going to spend hours in the dos cli configuring irq numbers and io addresses, dealing with constant crashes and manually installing networking support just so they can get a workable graphic interface to check their mail with, especially not when they already have a free alternative that works perfectly well and is backed by major corporations like Redhat and Canonical, as opposed to Windows which is only supported by Microsoft. The last thing I want is a chair-flinging gorilla (haha) providing me my OS.

From the article you quote:"For the first time, Linux has reached 1%. This past month the Linux share increased by 0.12% which is well above the average monthly increase of 0.02%."

What you have to say:"Vista sucked the big wet titty and you couldn't even gain marketshare against THAT."

Ummm, you fail. Linux (and so has Mac OS X) HAS gained a market share, just because it's not the majority doesn't mean that the inroads are being made. It takes a long time to overcome a monopoly on the market.

You're right. If you go out and buy those things without doing any research, they won't work on Linux. Of course, they won't work on a Macintosh either. So, I guess Macintosh isn't ready for the desktop yet as well?
I went to Best Buy.com and picked the first of each that came up. The printer (Epson PictureMate Dash) probably would have worked on a Mac and maybe would have worked on Ubuntu (the flavor of Linux I use). Without buying it, I can't tell for sure, but the information I found online seemed to sho

They've also built their fortune on making an OS you can install across x86 hardware (and even some other platforms).

It's not so much the EULA as a whole that's in question here as much as it is a specific clause of the EULA - the clause that states the OS may only be installed on a specific manufacturer's hardware. That is not Microsoft's business model so they would have absolutely no interest in helping their arch enemy protect it.

I'm not sure Microsoft is really where it is because of lack of cheap alternatives else Linux, certainly since the later Ubuntu releases would be doing much better.

I think it comes down more to interoperability, businesses buy a machine, it has Windows on it, so they figure they'll just go with Windows server, then they figure they may as well develop with Visual Studio and use MS SQL for their database and so on.

I think it's more about lockin - sure people could get systems with Mac OS X cheaper, but would

Most large corporations might not choke on that much debt, but they don't constitute most businesses. Considering that Psystar probably has little to no revenue coming in and no real future it's not surprising that they will just cut their losses without taking on more debt.

What kind of an idiot CEO decides with a very small company and almost no capital, to lock horns with one of the largest companies out their with a very. . . let's say 'speculative' business proposition at best? I suppose, maybe, if you're going to test the waters, perhaps doing it as a small company with no assets might actually be very cunning, because if you lose, Apple really isn't able to take anything. ..but at the same time, without sufficient funds, there's little chance you can survive the legal battles you first have to face in order to try to attain a ruling from the Courts that your business doesn't actually infringe their copyrights.

(I mean, if I pay Apple for Mac OS X, in order to put it on a different computer, I fail to see how that has infringed their *COPY* rights - the copy is legal; they shouldn't have any say in what I do with that copy or what hardware I run it on, once the copy is licensed, but. . . it was obvious Apple would try to stop them with a lawsuit, and they'd have to fight the total GARBAGE law known as the DMCA,, before they could ever get to the point of, hopefully, getting a ruling that they weren't infringing).

If you're blowing through venture capital (i.e. not your own money.) the entire time, why not take on as many lawsuits as possible and ride the gravy train for as long as you can continue to do so? Hell, give yourself a nice bonus for being so brave as to challenge such a large and established corporation. After all, if you're successful, think of all the money that you'll be able to pull in with your new (and booming) business that can't be touched*.

I don't know if that's the case, but there are some [wikipedia.org] good examples of where this has happened.

The DMCA has not come up in this legal battle that I know of. Apple might, however, add DRM and use the DMCA to stop Pystar and others going forward.

Yes, it has come up. One of the things that Apple sued for was DMCA violation. And Psystar's answer was "Apple is an evil monopolist that puts things into its code to prevent it from running on our computers, and we had to remove it, but it isn't DRM".

Apple's DRM in MacOS X is quite well documented. There is a chip on the Macintosh motherboard containing a 64 bit number which is used by the OS to decrypt several important modules. It is completely unnoticeable to a Macintosh user; it doesn't prevent you

That must be a typo - could they mean $ 250 million USD ? Most companies would not
choke on $ 250,000 worth of debt.

Unless they wanted to choke... as stated earlier, an important side-effect of bankruptcy is the disruption of all outstanding litigation... Maybe Apple was getting too close to finding the money behind PsyStar?

They're filing chapter 11 bankruptcy, which means they cancel all debts and continue operations with a clean slate. Once (if) they emerge from bankruptcy, the lawsuit resumes. I wonder how their lawyers feel about being stiffed?

While I agree with the mods that the parent could definitely use some tact and probably deserves the moderation. The point raised is valid. The mystery money behind Psystar will be revealed in the bankruptcy hearings as anyone that has given Psystar money would be considered a creditor. As a creditor you have a vested interest in reclaiming as you can of Psystars remaining assets in court. Their identity can only remain secret if they decide not to reclaim any of their losses and not participate in the bankruptcy hearings. Also, GPs point is invalidated in the summary, whicg indicated Apple's lawsuit will resume one bankruptcy is over. So anything that was going to be revealed from that can still be revealed.

From a purely non-techy viewpoint, the arguments are a lot less clear and can be spun a myriad of ways in the SCO v. Linux debacle.

However, the Apple v. Psystar is much more clear-cut. It also helps that Apple themselves defined much of the legal territory they are going to depend upon down the road when they sued Franklin Computer et. al. back in the Apple ][ clone days.

Well it depends, doesn't it? Even if they only have $5K in debt, but have practically no income, can't get credit, and have no assets to speak of, then they're bound to go belly-up sooner or later. It's really a question of when the bank turns off the credit, and this credit crunch isn't really over.

Why would anyone want to run Mac OS on unsupported hardware? It's going to be unstable, missing features, and chances are that getting updates from Apple to install with or without hosing your installation is going to be a bitch.

Macs use commercial hardware like everyone else does. They aren't so customized in every detail that they are in all ways incompatible. That was one of the reasons for coming to x86 and the PCI motherboard. Better support options.

As long as the hardware has been vetted for Mac, it doesn't have come from Mac.

Basically it boils down to this (As a prepare to build my hackintosh, parts in the mail),

I can get a great tower computer with lots of expandability for $1100 (Includes the cost of the OS). To get an equally expandable tower from apple (with room for more than 1 hard drive) would cost me $2500. The larger and growing larger hole in the mac lineup is the tower. as an apple investor I find it inexcusable.

For me its this or a windows box, both have the tools for my photography and programming.

Acomj pretty much nailed it. Looking at the hardware line-up, the machine I built when i7 came out was ~$1400 without a video card on the first day of release (overpriced). I leave out the video card since the rest of the components are either the same or equivalent with the exception of my video card. An equivalent Mac Pro is ~$2400 now (4 months after i7 release, i.e. cheaper) assuming $2500 less the price of the video card.

Well in fairness, there's nothing wrong with the hardware Apple offers, and it's not even that terribly overpriced. It's just-- like you said-- there's a hole in their lineup. It would be nice if they offered an expandable mid-range tower.

But then, part of the problem there is that they don't really care to let people expand. That's my theory. It's not so much that they want to force you to buy a new machine, but if you can upgrade your sound card and video card, suddenly Apple has to support an endles

Now, I'm sure this is going to be controversial, but I'll pose the question anyway:

What would you really want to use those PCIe slots for that you couldn't find reasonably equivalent functionality via USB or Firewire? Bonus points if there are mac drivers available.

If the answer includes Gigabit Ethernet (note that we'd be talking about a *second* GigE port, since the iMac comes with one), Fiber Channel or RAID, then doesn't that imply that you'd be better served by either the Mac Pro or an XServe anyway?

TV tuners and video capture? There are plenty of those for USB, FW or Ethernet.

What I'm saying is that the "mid tower" you describe *likely* doesn't differ significantly from the iMac except for not having a built-in display, those PCIe slots and extra optical and internal drive bays - and in the case of the optical and/or hard drive bays, FW800 is an alternative. And I am honestly struggling to think of why those PCIe slots are missed.

What I'm saying is that the "mid tower" you describe *likely* doesn't differ significantly from the iMac

The main difference is that it could be much cheaper with the same profit margin. The problem with the iMac and AIO desktops in general is that they're more expensive than buying the equivalent pieces individually, so if you don't place a large positive value on the integration then it's not a good deal.

Yes, you and a few dozen slashdot nerds and nobody else. People who need a big professional machine are willing to pay for it and buy a Mac Pro with 2-4 core processors and up to 32 GB of RAM. These people are usually creators of content who wish to use a computer professionally rather than futz with it for its own sake.

Other than nerdy geeky things, an iMac will do everything 99% of normal users might wish to do. Nowadays, most ordinary users are buying laptops anyway. T

No, he's the sort that can still use the Mac they purchased seven years ago because it was upgradable and expandable. It would be obsolete dumpster filler without that option, just like how "Any slotless-Mac you buy right now will obsolete once the first USB 3 only peripheral ships."

But do you really want that much GPU hardware with a machine that only has a single 2-3 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU? Wouldn't you do better with at least 4 cores with such monstrous graphics hardware? Say... like in a Mac Pro?

We, for example, considered moving our staff onto Macs to take advantage of some Mac-only software. But since a) all our staff use dual screens in a portrait configuration and b) quite a few of them need to have "medically certified" screens, that would mean everyone has to get a Mac Pro, which is ridiculous when in every other way, a Mac Mini would have been sufficient.

Then the new mac minis satisfy your requirements - they can drive dual displays now since they have a mini DVI and mini display port.

Every couple years, something amazing comes out that actually needs good integration. Nobody knows what it will be yet. But everyone with an iMac will have to settle for the external USB2 version that barely kinda works.

The problem has been that every couple of years the busses change too. A couple years ago, it was PCI-X and before that it was wide PCI, and AGP for video. If tomorrow's hot new thing is available only with tomorrow's hot new bus, it doesn't matter how many PCIe slots you've got, you're still hosed.

The trend has actually been away from internal bus based expansion and towards network (via Ethernet and WiFi) and external expansion (via USB, Firewire or bluetooth). In that sense, Apple has (once again) been l

I can certainly understand that you want an expandable machine, and want to run OS X, and want it to be under $1500 -- those are pretty reasonable desires from a power-user computer owner. But I'm not sure you outrage is justified as an investor -- Apple seems to be doing pretty well selling non-expandable machines in the mid-range, and they have been for years. If Apple was primarily in the market for budget-oriented power-users it would be silly to not offer a cheaper tower, but they're not, and it's probably not a great business strategy for them to try; there's a very real chance it would hurt their sales and confuse their marketing in the other, well-established, successful market segments where the currently operate.

The tower is in its last days as a mass market product. Too much space. Too much power. Too much weight.

I agree totally. My most recent purchase was a 20" Core2 Duo iMac in January. I have towers and rack-mount chassis that I never opened. I used to buy into the notion that I needed all of the extra drive bays and PCI slots and the big power supply, until I realized that I never installed more hard disks or PCI devices.

The iMac takes up minimal space on my desk, and I have some FireWire hard disks for things like audio projects, the Time Machine backup and my iTunes library.

Why would anyone want to run Mac OS on unsupported hardware? It's going to be unstable, missing features, and chances are that getting updates from Apple to install with or without hosing your installation is going to be a bitch.

Why would anyone want to run Mac OS on unsupported hardware? It's going to be unstable, missing features...

It never ceases to amaze me that so many people (and so many of them are Apple fans!) think that Mac OS is an unportable piece of shit. It isn't.

When it comes to device independence, Mac OS (both classic and X) is right up there with Linux and *BSD. Sure, all the device drivers haven't actually been written but it's pretty damn clear that most of Mac OS functionality has been separated from the drivers.

Back in the 90s I ran Mac OS 7.x as a task on my Amiga, and it wasn't unstable at all. A Mac emulator was pretty much really just a collection of virtual drivers (drivers from MacOS' point of view, and OS calls from AmigaOS's point of view). It not only worked, but it worked well.

And the existence of modern x86 Hackintoshes shows that Apple didn't somehow get incredibly inept and start hard-coding specific Mac-hardware-du-juor dependence when they made OS X. Just how incompetent do people think Apple's programmers are? Do you think they're going to tell Steve, "no, you can't release any new Mac models, because we didn't make the OS portable enough that we can get it running on your new toy by writing a few drivers"?!

Give it a rest on the stupid, inane, and naive comments that hardware diversity is somehow related to OSes being flaky or broken. That's not how any of today's OSes work (even That One Exception (you know who) can't legitimately blame their flakiness on hardware diversity).

If anything, I've found that the more general you make things, the better they tend to work. And that's not some great insight; it's something everyone knows, including Mac OS X's developers.

With a fixed hardware base to test any updates on before distributing etc. its a pretty slick experience, in fact slicker than some hit and giggle linux distros. As long as you wait for someone to work out how to do the next major update you're fine.

Dell mini 9, fully hackintoshed, everything working including BT, two finger scroll, sleep and built in WWAN (3G).

After all, any 3l33t Hax0r can download a hacked copy of OSX from usenet and get it running on their PC.

Maybe. Or maybe they'll find that their PC doesn't have the right set of components - OS X isn't exactly compatible with a wide variety of hardware, you know? What Psystar provides is a system that's known to be compatible with OS X, with prices and configurations that fill the huge, gaping chasm between the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro.

What exactly is the attraction here? Is OSX really that great compared to other operating systems? I don't think so, and obviously most other people agree.

I do think OSX is that great. And since "most other people" don't even know any system but the Windows that came with their PCs, I see no reason to give a flying fuck about whatever they think about this.

actually, the bankruptcy filing will releav exactly who is funding them. In the pending court case, the investors could be protected, but in SEC investigations, and in bank records that are required to be made public durring a bankruptcy, this has to come to light.

Even if they had made such a donation, without the hopes of a return on their investment, such a donation would be required to be documented. There are limits to such donations by US law (what i don;t know, but I know the SEC limits such "meddling"

Apple has promised there will not be chip level lockdowns in OS X, or any future apple OS. their OS runs on commodoty hardware, they only license it to run on Apple Brnaded systems (currently). It;s been rumored for years that Apple is partnering with dozens of vendors and plans to release an OS X approved spec and sell OS X on shelves opposite Windows (likely on a price tier competitive to Home Premium, but including iLife).

Apple has not released OS X for open systems for 1 primary reason: they don;t want to support your junk kit, and they don;t want to get the blame for OS X having stability issues. If manufacturers are allowed to be held to the same wishy washy standards as micsoft, then not only would OS X be seen to be just as unstable, but it would likely be sold on many systems that don't really meet the minimum specs of iLife, and would provide a lack-luster performance.

The hardware market has been shrinking (unified drivers, fewer verndors, better driver certification, open standards). In a couple of years, especially once dedicated GPUs become the norm across all systems, and when comodoty $500 PCs have significant specs, I expect to see Apple come pre-configured, OEM, on select systems, but by that point, Apple hardware should also be slightly more in line price-wise (on several systems, Apple is actually currently cheaper than the competition, especially in the pro and server lines, but on the low end there's still a premium for the design and software).

Apple has not released OS X for open systems for 1 primary reason: they don;t want to support your junk kit, and they don;t want to get the blame for OS X having stability issues. If manufacturers are allowed to be held to the same wishy washy standards as micsoft, then not only would OS X be seen to be just as unstable, but it would likely be sold on many systems that don't really meet the minimum specs of iLife, and would provide a lack-luster performance.

Lets do ignore that the last time they allowed clones, they got their lunch eaten.

I agree, stability would be an excellent reason. But the pure truth of the matter is, even with the change to Intel, Mac's are priced more on brand name than the cost of the parts that go into them.

Apple can't compete against a company that can produce cheaper products because Apple considers one of it's strengths to be it's "Designer Computer" status.

Apple will never (in it's current incarnation and under Steve) allow anyone but Apple sell Apple computers. Period. They can talk all they want about how in the future we'll have jetpacks and a "Dell Mac" on every desk. But when it comes down to the brass tacks, it'll never happen and they certainly are not basing their business plans on the idea that it could.

That is the biggest question. They couldn't undercut Apple in the market segment which could mean that Apple's are well priced for what they have to offer? Too little people interested in non-Apple Mac products which could mean that they didn't offer the same service as Apple does or their products were of lower quality? Or did their management just drink all profits that should've been used to expand the company and pay for in-house lawyers?

Don't you actually have to sell something to make a profit? Has anyone actual obtained proof that Psystar actually shipped any products?

They shipped. What sort of proof do you want? The relevant forums are full of people who received them talking about them. Then there are the blogs of people who got them. The news coverage. The review sites... pretty much all confirm they were shipping (until the court ordered to stop).

I mean, at this stage, asking for proof psystar actually shipped any products is on par with asking for proof Alienware ever shipped anything before being bought out by dell.

I think the problem was that to the average consumer they were pretty obscure, had no retail presense, or brand-recognition, or brand-loyalty. For the informed, I'm sure a lot were fearful that if Apple won, the company would fold and support would disappear or an Apple update would cause system instability or worse. In addition, there are true apple "fans" that appreciate the products/service/support/buying experience. For the well informed, it isn't "overly" hard to build a Hackintosh if you're capable of following directions and have some initative, and can be done on hardware many have lying around.
I think the first group and loyalists are by-and-large the vast majority... except maybe on/.

I think ultimately, the problem is, while the clones are indeed cheaper, they aren't cheap enough for the hassle... at least to the average folks interested in "Apple compatible hardware". Say maybe I save $150 of the price of the same/similar spec'd Mac at Whatever Superstore. Then I have to wait for it to be built and shipped, and Id wager that this company isn't too quick about such things. You also have nowhere (especially now) to get warranty work done. You have to rely on PsyStar for patches. If I rea

Mac clone companies will never make it. Macs are over priced, but people pay that premium because they want an Apple product. Apple and it's products are in line with the Fashion industry. They are stylish to have.

To have a clone Mac is like someone buying a watch (or hand bag) off the street vendors in New York, except you don't even get the Mac logo that tells everyone how cool you are because you own a Mac.:D

You must have missed the clone companies in the 1990s.......they were eating Apple's lunch.

Unfortunately 90% of the Mac clones sold were junk that used Apple's valuable brand to make the sale then devalued it when the machine broke after a few months or crashed constantly. The only really decent clone maker was Power Computing, which Apple actually acquired.

Mac clones were a bust for Apple and not sustainable in the long term given the very broken desktop OS market, which persists to this day. Until that market is restored to something close to competitive, Apple would be idiotic to try and buil

"Macs are over priced, but people pay that premium because they want an Apple product."

Your statement seems to contradict itself. If something were overpriced then it would cost more than the market would pay for it, slowly leading to the demise of the manufacturer. But as you note, Apple products seem sell reasonably well, even at a perceived price premium. That would lead me to conclude that, from a market perspective, their products are not truly overpriced.

If a company offers a product that the market percieves as superior, people will pay more for it. This applies to everything from dairy products to automobiles to consumer electronics. The fact that Apple is able to sell products for a reasonable profit isn't really much of an argument against them or their products.

PowerPC, on the other hand, is all but dead. It exists only in embedded applications today, and in AS/400 systems (and maybe some low end RS6ks. Yes, I know both are renamed now; I don't care.) Probably the majority of PPCs actually running in the USA are now in video game consoles, especially if you count individual cores:)

Or, maybe they'll make sure MacOS requires some sort of "trusted computing platform" nonsense laced throughout the entire software stack, so that it's really impossible to run the software directly on a system without hardware support for DRM (which would mean running it on a VM that emulated that would be a clea

You can build a Hackintosh yourself. Bootloaders and such are out there - you can run Leopard on a regular PC, as long as you are careful to only use supported components. Amazingly enough, Apple has been remarkably nonchalant about this. So why do they have such a big problem with Psystar?

Running OSX on a white-box PC takes technical know-how and a willingness to put up with some level of brokenness. This is the polar opposite of 99.9% of Mac buyers, who want their computer to just work - that's why they bought a Mac in the first place. So Hackintoshes do not meaningfully decrease Mac sales - indeed, they might even (very) slightly increase Mac sales because they get people invested in the Mac ecosystem. (Once you've wrangled with getting OSX to run on your white-box PC, only to have to do it again for the next point update, the convenience of a real Mac starts looking like a pretty darn good upgrade.)

The problem with Psystar is that they were promising to make their white-box Mac clones easy to maintain, thus destroying the selling point of a real Mac.

It also means that people might blame OSX for quirks in the hardware compatablity. That is something Apple, a company very much concerned about reputation, does not want. As long as Apple controls both the hardware and software, they are able to eliminate a large portion of things that can go wrong and thus nothing threatens people's perception of the "mac experience".

Because Apple would have to write drivers for OSX then. They are so controlling and paranoid about quality they don't even let the card manufacturers write drivers. NVIDIA drivers in OSX are written by apple with apple specific GL extentions, etc...

You can build a Hackintosh yourself. Bootloaders and such are out there - you can run Leopard on a regular PC, as long as you are careful to only use supported components. Amazingly enough, Apple has been remarkably nonchalant about this. So why do they have such a big problem with Psystar?

Apple jealously guards their brand. They work hard in support and towards reliability and packaging such that they are consistently rated top in the industry by their customers. OS X is Apple's crown jewels and is strongly associated with Apple's brand.

So some computer geek hacks a machine to run OS X, even in violation of the license. Why would Apple care? A geek knows it is going to have issues that aren't Apple's fault and taking individuals to court just gives them negative publicity for an issue that i

People who want a computer with all the bells and whistles* but the ability to say "I got the cheapest {Y} that {X} offers?" If they actually offer the machines without all the bells and whistles, they might lose some of those people.

I dunno. The "Apple suing them in the face" problem was a pretty serious one, and is probably what did them in in the end; but their business model is by no means a certain failure.

PC assembly is a fairly low margin business; but there are plenty of companies, large and small, that make a living at it. Psystar had the advantage of massive word-of-mouth and R&D done for them by the hackintosh enthusiasts. Were it not for the legal trouble, I would assume that (barring specific incompetence) they could have carried on for a fair while.

I dunno. The "Apple suing them in the face" problem was a pretty serious one, and is probably what did them in in the end; but their business model is by no means a certain failure.

I don't understand this opinion. So let's say in the best case, most realistic scenario Pystar and these other companies get the relevant provisions of Apple's OS X licensing declared unenforceable and they are removed from the license. They are now in the business of competing with Apple to sell hardware, while having to buy the OS from Apple. If they become moderately successful, what is there to stop Apple from no longer selling boxed copies of their OS and thus killing them?

Seriously. Selling boxed copies of OS X is a small part of Apple's business. They could switch to online distribution for upgrades and use DRM to prevent them from installing. End result, Pystar and their ilk die and Apple's customers are inconvenienced with DRM. Gee, thanks guys.

Or, Apple could go a more drastic route. They could simply ditch selling new versions of OS X and provide them free of charge to all Mac owners. It would barely dent their profits and lower their support and development costs considerably. Or they could take a middle road and sell a yearly service like their ".mac" service and include in that service upgrades to the OS and network services like e-mail, but provide no other upgrade path for individual licensors. Either way Pystar dies and Apple moves on without worrying about being undercut.

The way I see it, if Pystar and the like succeed, all they do is drive Apple to change policy enough to kill them. Any business model built upon being successful but not too successful lest the company you rely entirely upon kill you, is a doomed business model.

Or Apple could take advantage of the TPM chip that's been present in Macs since almost immediately after they moved to the x86 platform.

As I understand it they stopped including a TPM chip after a short time citing cost and lack of interest from developers. A quick Google search finds this: Tom's Hardware Article [tomshardware.com] provide a source for such a claim (end of the first paragraph). Another response to your post claims Apple uses TPM to lock down OS X, but I've never heard any knowledgeable source make such a claim. Here's a detailed article [osxbook.com] explaining about Apple's use of TPM as a tool for cryptography and how it has never been used as DRM on OS X.

Lies.
They've never used the TPM chip.
They've always relied on modern computers having EFI disabled. (Most computers ship with the Framework, which is EFI based, but EFI support is complete disabled and only the BIOS compatibility mode is used.
Source: http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/ [osxbook.com]

Apple would be violating anti-trust laws by not selling their operating system & upgrades separately, period.

I have two comments here. First, to be violating antitrust laws Apple would have to have a monopoly in one of the relevant markets. I suspect you know very little about antitrust laws, but on the off chance you are not clueless, what market do you think it is that Apple has monopolized? Second, writing the word "period" followed by the punctuation mark "." is redundant. I understand in speaking using this technique but it does not apply in written communication. Please stop it.

Psystar's case was legally winnable, but they didn't have the backers for winning in court.

Do you know what Pystar's case was about? Even if it was winnable, my post explains why it doesn't matter.

It might fair better for European clone makers since anti-trust laws will be enforced more correctly against non-European companies, i.e. Apple.

The EU antitrust laws are about the same as ours and I still don't see the monopoly you are predicating such action upon. Further, you specify non-European companies as though that makes a difference, which anyone with a clue knows is irrelevant. Please do a little research and see the hundreds of European companies the commission has taken action against before making such slanderously uninformed claims.

So you expect them to just give up on the rather lucrative sales of OSX to all their old macs? I bought leopard for my 3 year old macbook along with a new hard drive. Thats $150.00 of almost pure profit for Apple, that they wouldnt have gotten from me otherwise, I had restore CD's, I could have used them, but I wanted expose and spaces and time machine.
I highly doubt they'd give up that second sale just to spite another company.

All Apple's software sales together make up about 6% of their profits. That includes iWork and all their professional software. OS X is probably less than 1%. It is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. They can eat the cost. They can raise the cost of Macs ever so slightly and people will pay it, especially if the value of macs goes up by having free OS upgrades. Or they can incorporate the sales into the.mac service thus increasing profits by getting people to subscribe to a yearly service

Imagine that you've upgraded both your software and hardware. The new hardware (perhaps a RAID card, or a video card) works fairly well with your new system, but not well at all with the system originally sold with your mac. Something goes wrong-- and your entire system has to be installed from scratch.If you have to upgrade from the original system first, it's a real pain, and adds another hour or two. Now, I suppose Apple could just ask to validate the original system install disks after installing the ne

There's always the iMac... Quite frankly, Apple needs a Powermac G4 equivalent-- an Core i7 with a few slots. With USB 3.0 on the horizon, and games demanding better and better graphics cards, a cheapish PCI machine might just hold its value.

On the other hand, I have a late model PowerMac G4 with one additional IDE hard drive (for time machine), one USB 2.0 card (for an iPod), and very slightly upgraded graphics in the form of a Radeon 9600 Pro.

Apple is a business and will do what makes the most business sense. In the face of significant erosion of their Mac business to clone makers or to threats to their brand, that's probably to move away from their currently DRM free, trust the user, policy and towards a DRM lockdown.

Trust the user. You must be new to dealing with Apple.

Apple has been fucking over their users for years.

You're an idiot. It's perfectly legal to run a business so successfully you gain a monopoly. It's only illegal to abuse that mo

Psystar had the advantage of massive word-of-mouth and R&D done for them by the hackintosh enthusiasts. Were it not for the legal trouble, I would assume that (barring specific incompetence) they could have carried on for a fair while.

I agree that they had major name recognition, but that recognition equated to them being labeled "the guys who are pissing off Apple by making clones" and not "the guys who are making awesome, cheap Mac clones that I want to buy". The members of the/. community that enjoy Macs do so because of the technical merits (UNIX underpinnings, efficient GUI, etc. [don't flame me]). The rest of the world likes Macs because they're "cool" and they don't necessarily define that "coolness" explicitly. So, if a/.er wants the technical advantages of having a Mac without the price, they go for a hackintosh. The problem there is that a/.er is probably just going to build that hackintosh him/herself rather than pay Psystar for one. Not only is it cheaper, but you get to learn something in the process. The rest of the world would see a Mac clone and say "that's not a Mac! It's not cool!" and move along.

When I hear "normal" people complain about Macs, what I hear consistently is "I wish Apple would make a cheaper Mac", not "I wish some other company would step in and compete with Apple to drive down the price." What I'm trying to say is that the market for pre-built hackintoshes is tiny. Of all the people I know, both technical and nontechnical, I can't imagine any of them buying one.